Navigate:

Valerie Jarrett for the defense

President Barack Obama, with a second-term team built for fight not compromise, has made it clear that he plans to change very little. No new faces in his innermost circle. No revolution in how he courts Congress. No new love for the permanent Washingtonians who feel a persistent chill from 1600 Pennsylvania. And so far, no new women in key positions in a West Wing some have long felt suffers from excess testosterone.

Many Obama insiders were embarrassed last week when the front page of The New York Times carried a photo, which had been released by the White House, showing Obama meeting in the Oval Office in December with 10 white men from his senior staff — with Valerie Jarrett’s leg, jutting from behind one of the guys, as the only sign of female input. Jarrett, in a 45-minute interview Thursday in the West Wing office that once belonged to Hillary Clinton and Karl Rove, argued that this was a case where “one picture really didn’t say a thousand words.”

Text Size

“The reality is that this president has been surrounded by strong women his entire life,” she said. “Early on, women who had not been a part of the campaign came and worked in the White House, and they don’t know the president. … What the president wants is for people to come in and fight for their ideas — not so that they win, but because he will make better decisions if they’re advocating and telling him what they think. … So, I say, ‘Speak up! Speak up!’ ”

On her wall is a birthday gift from her boss – a frame containing the original petition to give women the vote in 1866, and the final resolution passed by Congress in 1919 – 53 years later. “Valerie,” Obama wrote. “You are carrying on a legacy of strong women making history! Happy Birthday, Barack Obama.”

Jarrett takes on the complaints of women who have worked in the West Wing head on, particularly the notion that you have to be able to shoot hoops, or play golf or talk shop or be a poker shark to gain the president’s confidence. “I don’t play golf. I don’t play basketball. I don’t really like cards,” she said. “I don’t think anybody questions whether or not I have a role to play here. And so I think it is irrelevant whether the president wants to do that in some of his free time. What’s really important is when we have something to say, does he listen to us? And he does.”

Besides diversity, the other big rap on Obama’s senior staff is insularity. The president has taken the comfort-food approach to his second-term team, with promotions for guys who have been with him going back to the ’08 campaign, and many fewer departures than even his own staffers had expected. To those who think he needs change of his own, his message since the election has amounted to: “It’s not me — it’s you.” We read Jarrett an email from a former West Wing colleague who said: “They really just need new people. Everyone is so dead tired. They need new energy, new life, new ideas.”

“That’s from somebody who left?” Jarrett asked. “Well, they probably left because they were tired. I think the people who are left behind are energized. I don’t get the sense of fatigue at all. … So, it sounds like somebody who probably needed a rest, and there’s no harm in that. … These are hard jobs, and people do burn out.”